But Rebekah was in no mood to hear such things. She whirled on Akyas and hurled words at her like stones. “A mother’s love! You lied to me too, from the moment you first entered my tent. Is that why you came? To mock me?” Rebekah turned to look at all the others from the camp. “And you!” she cried. “All of you, tut-tutting about how sorry you were my mother was dead and how nice it would have been if she had lived. All of you liars, and me the only one who didn’t know the truth!”

Several of the women were weeping; others stared at the ground. Only Pillel met her gaze steadily, as if defying her to tell what they should have done.

She knew she was being unfair. But they had all been unfair to her.

“I didn’t know,” said Laban miserably. “I was lied to as much as you.”

“What are you saying!” Father demanded. “Tell me what you’re saying!”

Rebekah deliberately drew her foot across Akyas’s vow that she had written in the dirt, and replaced it with letters boldly and angrily gouged. “Why bother to tell you, when you’ll only make up your own version and make everybody else tell it for fifteen years?”

She was still writing when he began to answer, a note of pleading in his voice. “It was a terrible thing to take your mother from you, but all I could see was that she was going to raise you to believe in Asherah, at least a little, and you can’t believe even a little in Asherah and still believe in God at all. You needed a mother, but you needed God more. Do you think I wanted to send her away? Do you think I haven’t longed for her every day for fifteen years? Every time I saw your face, I saw her and hated myself for sending her away, but every time I saw how you love God and serve him, I knew I had done right.”

She wrote again, but the anger was dissipating now, leaving her merely . . . tired. Dry. “That doesn’t explain why you lied. That wasn’t for God, that was so I wouldn’t blame you. It was cowardly.”

“I, I, I,” said Laban. “You talk as if you’re the only one they lied to, the only one who lost your mother.”

“You’re a boy,” said Rebekah impatiently. “You don’t need . . .” But the look on his face stopped her. Obviously the words she was about to say were deeply wrong. He had needed his mother. And as he collapsed again into weeping, she realized that judging from her fury and his sobbing, he was the one most deeply hurt by this.

And maybe he was. Because she, at least, had Deborah all her life.